Hubble and Chandra Telescopes Find Supermassive Black Hole

Illustration of two adjacent black holes (photo: NASA dock)

JAKARTA – NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory have detected two supermassive black holes facing each other. Both are located about 300 light-years from Earth.

NASA explained that the two black holes are in a pair of colliding galaxies called MCG-03-34-64. This astronomical object is driven by falling gas and dust so that its light is so bright and shines like Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN).

This is not the first time NASA scientists have found a pair of black holes. Previously, there were dozens of double black holes found in various galaxies, but AGN is the closest pair ever detected by Hubble and Chandra.

Anna Trindade Falcão, one of the scientists who discovered the pair of black holes, said that the discovery of AGN was not intentional or just a coincidence. This black hole could be detected thanks to Hubble's high-resolution imagery.

"We didn't expect to see something like this," Anna said, quoted from the NASA blog. "This view is not common in the nearby universe, and it tells us that there is something else going on inside the galaxy."

Before these two black holes were discovered, Hubble revealed three optical diffraction spikes nested inside the host galaxy. These diffraction spikes indicate a large concentration of glowing oxygen gas in a very small area.

Diffraction spikes are artifacts an image that occurs when light from a very small region of space is seen to bend around a mirror in a telescope. After the diffraction spike was seen, Anna and her colleagues began observing MCG-03-34-64.

"When you see bright light in optical, X-ray and radio wavelengths, a lot of things can be ruled out, so the conclusion is that these things can only be explained by black holes being close together. When you put all the pieces together, you get a picture of an AGN duo," Anna explains.

Before they were close together, the two supermassive black holes were at the cores of different host galaxies. However, as the galaxies of the two black holes got closer together, their black holes also started to get closer together. The black hole duo is expected to merge into one in the next 100 million years.